Yosemite vs. Numbers/Pages

[Dick H.]

I have had my iMac since 2011, gradually working up to OSX 10.6.8. After having lots of issues with streaming news, non-playing videos, overlapping text boxes in Safari, etc., I decided to "fix" things. I increased the RAM to 16Gb, and had my grandson install OSX 10.10.5, which was the latest that he felt would be compatible. Big improvement - in SOME areas!

Spreadsheets created in Numbers'09 v2.1 (436) with the old OS now behave very strangely. I can click on a cell and wait up to 10 seconds for it to become active. Formulas do not copy correctly, nor produce the intended result. In short, it is a complete mess. Sad, because it WAS very straightforward, lightning fast, and NEVER hiccupped.

I am in the midst of writing a book in Pages'09, and, though it is backed up, am almost afraid to open the manuscript if Pages is going to be as fouled up as Numbers seems to be.

I THOUGHT that upgrading the OS would not harm backwards compatibility, but that seems not to be the case. I also thought that the new OS would come with revised versions of Pages and Numbers, but it did not.

All suggestions welcome - if upgrading the apps is the only answer, so be it, but I'd rather not, having seen some pretty negative reviews of both Pages and Numbers, citing a lot of totally unnecessary fluff.

Thanks in advance!

 

[honestone]

First, I'm surprised that Yosemite did not include newer/revised versions of Pages and Numbers. I myself use Office for the Mac, having started with Office 2008, then Office 2011, and recently Office 2016. I have no issues opening Word and Excel documents created with Office 2008 versions with Office 2016 versions. The same is true for Outlook, as when I upgraded from Outlook 2011 to Outlook 2016, the transition was very, very smooth, and all my EMails remained in tact.

Via a google search, here is a link that shows newer versions of Pages and Numbers released in Oct 2014, around the same time Yosemite came out:

https://9to5mac.com/2014/10/16/appl...semite-visual-updates-and-other-improvements/

Also, wonder how your grand son upgraded from OS 10.6.8 to OS 10.10.5? If it was done "in place", that is, having OS 10.10.5 basically overwrite OS 10.6.8, that might not have been the best way to do it. As it is, that is/was a significant jump in Mac OS versions.

Additionally, if you were using any third party apps with OS 10.6.8, hopefully your grand son insured that either they were compatible with OS 10.10.5, or he downloaded and installed any needed updates for such software.

Finally, a couple of additional, but pertinent, questions:

1. Have you ever done any disk cleanup/maintenance/repairs? That is important, as computers are just like cars, and need TLC.

2. Are you doing any backups to an external device? That is critical also.

 

[iMav]

Which specific model of iMac is it? (Apple icon (top left) -> "About This Mac")

it would be beneficial to do a clean/fresh install of the latest, supported operating system. Depending on how long you plan to keep the system around, you may want to look into updating to an SSD internally. That would give you a significant performance boost (assuming you aren't already leveraging flash storage).